Cain Strategy and ‘Fast and Furious’

Cain Strategy and ‘Fast and Furious’

“We’ll never waste a good crisis...”  Rahm Emmanuel

Alinsky Rule: Polarization...left vs right, Republicans vs Democrats, guns vs no guns, conservative vs liberal, union vs non-union, straight vs gay...etc...God vs...?

or..The ‘Cain’ Strategy from the Biblical ‘Cain and Abel’

So, while the ‘poles’ are fighting, destroying each other...who is it that moves in and takes over?

In the meantime nothing...except ‘power grabbing’...

       For the record: I hate guns.  Twice a bullet from an ‘unloaded’ gun narrowly missed

         my head.

What I hate more than guns: predatory, selective memory and hypocrisy

              I guess everyone has forgotten the ‘Fast and Furious’ gun sales debacle?

But, as Chesterton warns us, those ‘shadows’ we so carelessly discard stare ‘hard’ at us without smiling.

from After Every War

I remember that when my parents left the room, and

there was no need to learn or be polite, they spoke to each other in...

Even their voices began to return. What was it I had heard? Gossip

and anecdote? Or was I hearing distant towns, in their harsh

moment of reckoning—and wider tragedies of nationhood and

inhumanity—creeping through their words like fog under a

windowsill?

The truth is I couldn’t know: not then, not now...  ~ Eavan Bolan

Offering a Handful of Birdsong

Antigone takes place in the aftermath of a great war, when the dead are piled upon each other just outside the gates of the city-state. Hasenclever's Antigone (1917) shows that it was impossible to bury the dead to commemorate Germany's mass casualties in a therapeutic fashion. The commemoration that takes place on stage is in implicit dialogue with discourses of memorialization during and after World War I, converting the stage into a space of memory.

Gertrud Kolmar (1894-1943) Wir Juden ... called to me, Yearning: Redeem me, destined one— — —Who are you, that your command should be heard?

Yearning

I think of you,

I think of you always.

People spoke to me, but I didn’t take heed.

I looked into the deep Chinese blue of the evening sky from which

the moon hung as a round yellow lantern,

And mused upon another moon, yours...

The Street Sweeper: As the novel progresses, and more characters – from the past and present – are introduced, the connections and links between people multiply, rather like a Dickensian novel. There is, though, a point to these connections. Early in the novel, Perlman writes that

you never know the connections between things, people, places, ideas. But there are connections.

And these connections, whether we know it or not, can direct the trajectory of our lives – as they do for the characters in The street sweeper. There is also a central ideological connection in the book, and this is that there are “parallels between...

==========

Us.  Gertrud Kolmar reminds me again of the great danger in ‘deleting’ people, erasing them nonchalantly from my inside list as of no connection or interest to me.

                       I call then with a thin, ethereal cry.

                      You hear me speak. But do you hear me feel? - Gertrud Kolmar

She died in Auschwitz.

Da ich zittrig noch hingestellt

Was ich war: ein wächsernes Licht

Für das Wachen zur zweiten Welt.

(Because I tremblingly still set down

What I was: a waxen light

For the awakening to the second world.)

 The Woman Poet

You hold me now completely in your hands.

My heart beats like a frightened little bird's

Against your palm. Take heed! You do not think

A person lives within the page you thumb.

To you this book is paper, cloth, and ink,

Some binding thread and glue, and thus is dumb,

And cannot touch you (though the gaze be great

That seeks you from the printed marks inside),

And is an object with an object's fate.

And yet it has been veiled like a bride,

Adorned with gems, made ready to be loved,

Who asks you bashfully to change your mind,

To wake yourself, and feel, and to be moved.

But still she trembles, whispering to the wind:

"This shall not be." And smiles as if she knew.

Yet she must hope. A woman always tries,

Her very life is but a single "You . . ."

[...]

So then, to tell my story, here I stand.

The dress's tint, though bleached in bitter lye,

Has not all washed away. It still is real.

I call then with a thin, ethereal cry.

You hear me speak. But do you hear me feel? - Gertrud Kolmar (trans. Henry A. Smith)

I'm always amazed about these stories about children being abused in the proximity of so many "good citizens".  We have the usual reports from neighbors, who interacted with the family on a daily basis:

Wien - Als "freundlich und ganz nett", als "sympathisch und unauffällig" beschreiben die Anwohner in der Ybbsstraße von Amstetten ihren Nachbarn Josef F. (Residents of the Ybbstrasse in Amstetten described their neighbor Josef F. as "friendly and really nice" "there was nothing unusual at all")

And more:
Wie in solchen Fällen üblich sagen die Nachbarn, dass sie sich „das nicht vorstellen konnten“. Die Familie F. war „sehr nett “, Josef F., der bis zu seiner Pensionierung Elektriker war, „hat immer gerne geholfen, wenn es wo Probleme gab“, und er ist „sehr lieb mit Kindern umgegangen“. Dass er zu so einem Verbrechen fähig ist, nein, das will in Amstetten niemand glauben. (As is customary in such cases the neighbors claim "they could never imagine such a thing".  The family was "very nice",  Josef F., a retired electrician, "was always there to help out when there were problems" and was "always very sweet to the children.")

Ina Seidel and Gertrud Kolmar: a German "Friendship"

A few days ago I wrote about the the lyric poet Gertrud Kolmar who was virtually unknown in her short life, and even today does not receive the recognition she deserves for her powerful poems. But she did have some influential fans early in her writing career.  One was the bestselling author Ina Seidel, who achieved celebrity status in Germany with the publication of her novel Das Wunschkind (The Wanted Child) in 1930.  Ina Seidel became acquainted with Gertrud in Berlin and wanted to use her considerable influence to promote her poetry.  Together with Elisabeth Langgässer she published an anthology of poetry by women - Herz zum Hafen. Frauengedichte der Gegenwart - which included four key poems by Gertrud Kolmar and brought her to the attention of the broad reading public.  Unfortunately Herz zum Hafen was released in 1933, just after the Nazi seizure of power in Berlin. Ina Seidel threw her lot in with Hitler, and broke off all contact with Kolmar (as well as with the half-Jewish Langgässer).  [As did Heidegger and Wittgenstein, by the way...]  Gertrud Kolmar was devastated by the turn of events and the attitude of her erstwhile "friend".  She complained bitterly to her friend Karl Josef Keller, who recalled in his recollections of Gertrud Kolmar:

"G.K.beklagte sich auch bei mir über den plötzlichen Gesinnungswechsel ihrer 'arischen' Bekannten, die zuvor für ihre Arbeiten eingetreten waren. In diesem Zusammenhang nannte sie u.a. eine der bekanntesten deutschen Schriftstellerinnen, die m.E.in Berlin wohnhaft war."
(Gertrud Kolmar complained to me about the sudden change of heart of her "Aryan" friends who had championed her work.  In this connection she mentioned a very famous German woman author who was living in Berlin (Ina Seidel)).

Seidel became the most popular woman author in the Third Reich.  In her works she depicted the Nazi ideal of the feminine: the stoic mother of the German front soldier.  But she also wrote ecstatic poems and hymns to fuel the Nazi Führerkult...

A short time after this celebration, Ina Seidel's friend Gertrud Kolmar was sent to work as a slave laborer in a Nazi munitions plant.  Two years later she and the other Jewish workers were rounded up at the plant and sent to Auschwitz where they were murdered.  There is no record that Ina Seidel ever inquired about her friend or tried to intervene on her behalf.

After the war, Seidel's fame only grew.  Streets, Gymnasiums, elementary schools were named after her in West Germany.  Many bear her name still today.  And, in recognition of the new postwar order, Ina Seidel reminisced often about her "Jewish friend, Gertrud Kolmar"  up until her death in 1974. Posted by David Vickrey on’Dialog International...’

Forche, Carolyn [Forché];

Against Forgetting: Twentieth-century Poetry of Witness, W.W. Norton, 1993, 812 pages ISBN 0393033724, 9780393033724

The resulting situation for Jews who had gone through the process of

assimilation was a perpetual state of ‘inbetweenness’. Perceived as inalienably other,

yet in many ways representative of gentile society that projects this otherness, Jews

were subject to contradictory and conflicting societal expectations so that it was

impossible to fit in with established constructs. In Gertrud Kolmar’s prose and

dramatic works, textual devices denote the continuous inbetween status of the

characters...

I

...Proficient in English and German, Kolmar worked as a teacher and an interpreter for a brief period in 1918... When Kolmar’s mother became ill, she returned to the family home to care for her, leading a life withdrawn from social activities and the literary circles of Berlin. Following the death of her mother in 1930, Kolmar remained at the family home to care for her father, whose health was deteriorating. Kolmar was to remain by her father’s side until his deportation to Theresienstadt in 1942, which was followed by Kolmar’s deportation to Ausschwitz in February 1943. Kolmar’s writing career dates from 1917, when her first cycle of poetry, Gedichte, was published. The prose and dramatic works were written in the years immediately preceding and during the Nazi regime in Germany. These works are available today because Kolmar sent them to her sister in Switzerland for safekeeping.

A number of works, including a collection of poetry written in Hebrew, remained with the author and were consequently destroyed.

Kolmar has been appreciated mainly as a gifted poet... the epistolary autobiography presents women writers with the opportunity to “emphasize the inner realm, the private sanctuary of emotions that is often shared with the partner in the epistolary dialogue” (Shafi 2000: 106). Shafi’s analysis explores the representation of this ‘inner realm’ in Kolmar’s letters, seeing in the letters the forging of a “self that would be

able to resist the onslaught on her subjectivity” (Shafi 2000: 105).

... the struggles of the protagonists, as the aporetic nature of asserting a sense of self in a hostile environment that oppresses the individual was the marker...

Silence, Self and Sacrifice in Gertrud Kolmar’s Prose and Dramatic Works  Suzanne O’Connor, Dept. of German, The National University of Ireland Maynooth.  June 2010

But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her,
barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window
in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor.
She will look in at me with her thin arms extended,
offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.
~ Billy Collins, The Art of Drowning (1995). Tuesday, June 4, 1991

               ‘Sin is nothing but the refusal to recognize human misery.’ -Simone Weil 

Memory, what does it mean
to be clear? To be ice? To be twice? To be more?
We are gasping with asking since infancy, answerless—
What is the name of the cure?   ~ Blaga Dimitrova, a Bulgarian anti-communist writer 

who served as her country’s vice president... 

         "Silence prevails; it is an awful silence. The voice of Mary is heard no

               longer in the valley..”